Part-time MSc – Carbon Foot-printing and Life Cycle Assessment – Open to 6 Jan 17

Would you like to learn about LCA methodology?

A part-time MSc module on Carbon Foot-printing and Life Cycle Assessment will be delivered entirely online by Bangor University from January through to April 2017, drawing on freely available online calculators and the latest research to demonstrate application of LCA to evaluate bioenergy and bio-based product value chains, and their interaction with food production. This module is part of the Industrial Biotechnology MSc, and BBSRC Advanced Training Partnership. Anyone wishing to enrol on the full Bangor or Aberystwyth MSc courses that this module sits within may also be eligible for the new English postgraduate loan. Registration now open, until 6th January 2017.

See: http://www.atp-pasture.org.uk/en/study-options/distance-learning-modules/carbon-footprinting-and-life-cycle-assessment .

See also the module on On- Farm Anaerobic Digestion (AD) – May 2017.

EC Horizon 2020 call: greening the economy. Apply now, closes 7 Mar 17.

The European Commission invites proposals for its H2020-SC5-2017 Greening the economy – single stage call which closes 7 Mar 17.

Proposals may address the following topics:

  • climate services, including SC5-01-2017 exploiting the added value of climate services, SC5-02-2017 integrated European regional modelling and climate prediction system and SC5-04-2017 towards a robust and comprehensive greenhouse gas verification system
  • towards a low-carbon Europe, including SC5-06-2016 pathways towards the decarbonisation and resilience of the European economy in the timeframe 2030-2015 and beyond
  • raw materials, including SC5-13-2017 new solutions for sustainable production of raw materials
  • earth observation, including SC5-18-2017 novel in-sit observation systems
  • nature-based solutions for territorial resilience, including SC5-32-2017 biodiversity scenarios
  • water, including SC5-33-2017 closing the water gap

The indicative budget for this call is €124 million. See the H2020 Participant Portal: http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/desktop/en/opportunities/h2020/index.html, under the ‘Climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials’ work programme (Societal Challenges Pillar).

Want to hold a meeting to put a bid together – contact us! We have funds to assist.

EPSRC call for feasibility studies in energy – closes 5 Jan 17

Up to ÂŁ3m is available for this call, with a cap of ÂŁ200k for each proposal. Proposals should examine a topic within EPSRC’s Energy remit (e.g. Bioenergy), review past and current activity, and identify key research challenges that need to be addressed. The proposed research must be novel, innovative, have the potential to lead to high impact outcomes and strengthen the UK’s position in within the international energy community. Submissions towards this call must also demonstrate collaborations with established energy groups/organisations (academia, industry, non-governmental organisations, Government etc.) who are willing to support the research proposal and provide a potential route for exploitation. More information can be found on their website.

Tender for Industrial Biotechnology Landscape Report Provision (by 20 Jan 17 at 1200 hrs)

BACKGROUND
BBSRC, with support from EPSRC, have committed ÂŁ18M to fund 13 unique collaborative networks in Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy (BBSRC NIBB). The BBSRC NIBB foster collaborations between academia, industry, policy makers and NGOs in order to find new approaches to tackle research challenges, translate research and deliver key benefits in Industrial Biotechnology (IB). Each network has a particular focus area, mainly within the UK, but with interest to build international links. These multidisciplinary networks will drive new ideas to harness the potential of biological resources for producing and processing materials, biopharmaceuticals, chemicals and energy.

Four NIBBs (CBMNet, BIOCATNET, C1Net and P2P) are commissioning this project with the aim of mapping the strengths of the entire UK Industrial Biotechnology sector. The focus of the project should be on research and development through to commercialisation with additional focus on Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 4-7. The target audience for the report are UK funders and The Government.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATION
The report will provide the following:
1. A concise, critical synopsis of the relevant reports and roadmaps assessing and analysing UK Industrial Biotechnology and BioEnergy (IBBE) (see below for a list from a previous report; the list is not exhaustive), the report should cover the last 5 years. This exercise should identify any limitations in the existing studies and not simply summarise what is already known.
2. A detailed analysis of the current UK landscape in IBBE. Mapping the key capabilities (strengths and weaknesses e.g. research, technologies, scale up technologies) across the UK IBBE sector, including research organisations and small, medium, and large companies.
3. Critical evaluation of the current state of the UK IBBE sector, including its capacity to commercialise research.
4. A benchmark assessment of the UK IBBE industry compared to that of the top performing competitors (for example USA, Canada, Brazil, Malaysia and Germany).
5. Identify UK IBBE success stories and projects that provide examples of best practise for translation of research into commercial application (Case Studies).
6. Identify IBBE areas in which the UK could have a competitive advantage in terms of inherent resources (feedstocks), infrastructure (plant and buildings), innovation (expertise), enterprise and funding systems. This should include an assessment of whether and how IBBE-related IP generated in the UK is exploited in the UK.
7. Identify and assess options for an IBBE translation framework to support future commercialisation of IBBE research in the UK. This should include an assessment of various forward looking mechansims to encourage adoption of innovative solutions by industry by removing/mitigating risk.
8. Horizon scanning to identify emerging technologies and trends that will impact on a range of sectors and drive the future of IBBE in the UK.
9. Provide an evidence-based roadmap and policy recommendations for the developing key IBBE activities in which the UK has existing strength and capacity that provide a solid and credible foundation on which to build a competitive world-class UK IBBE sector.
If you would like to tender for this report or for more information, please see https://in-tendhost.co.uk/sheffield

The tender reference number is 1526/DM and the closing date for responses is at 12 noon on Friday 20th January 2017. To view the tender notice and access the documents, please hover over “Tenders” and click on “Current” and from there click “View Details”, finally please click on the “Express Interest” button where, after registering to use the site, you will be able to download the relevant details. Please also be aware that all correspondence’s & tender returns should be conducted through the In-tend site.
Contact Us

For any enquiries about our network, please contact:
Dr Jen Vanderhoven
Network Manager, CBM Network
jen.vanderhoven@sheffield.ac.uk
+44 (0) 114 2229766
University of Sheffield, E100 Addison Building, Firth Court, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN

Tracking Functional Microbiomes of UK Anaerobic Digesters

This 1 year project, funded by BBSRC and led by Professor Orkun Soyer at the University of Warwick, focuses on furthering our understanding of anaerobic digestion, particularly on how the complex microbial communities affect and are affected by operational conditions. Altogether, 16 UK full scale AD reactors are taking part in the project, where both genetic and meta-data are collected weekly. The large amounts of genetic data will allow us to characterise which species of microbes inhabit the digesters, what their functions are and, importantly, how they change over time. The meta-data will allow us to monitor changes in response to their environment. The datasets will be made available through the project website at http://anaerodynamics.com, funded by the AD Network. These will provide an unbiased and transparent source of information on the performance of industrial AD reactors in real time, which we hope will help to enhance and expand this technology in the UK. Enquiries can be directed to: Prof. Orkun Soyer at Warwick University.

Bangor University LCA Part-time MSc: Scrutinising bioenergy and bio-based products with life cycle assessment

Would you like to learn about LCA methodology?

A part-time MSc module on Carbon Foot-printing and Life Cycle Assessment will be delivered entirely online by Bangor University from January through to April 2017, drawing on freely available online calculators

Bioenergy and bio-based products for the circular economy

According to the IEA, “Bioenergy is energy derived from the conversion of biomass where biomass may be used directly as fuel, or processed into liquids and gases.” Examples include heat from wood pellets, electricity from biogas produced from food waste or crops, and electricity from combustion of straw or miscanthus. Policies to improve security of energy supply and reduce dependence on finite and polluting fossil fuels, exemplified by the Renewable Energy Directive, have been a major driver of the expansion of bioenergy across the EU over the past decade. 

Simultaneously, the Circular Economy Strategy is driving the use of bio-based products that can be recycled within biological cycles. A European standard defines “bio-based products” as “products wholly or partly derived from biomass, such as plants, trees or animals (the biomass can have undergone physical, chemical or biological treatment)”. Examples of bio-based products include egg cartons made from grass and recycled paper, and compostable bags made from polylactic acid derived from maize.

Whilst the aforementioned strategies are generally well targeted to improve the sustainability of our economy, they do place additional pressures on farming, and agricultural land resources, to produce the necessary bio-feedstocks. The production of such bio-feedstocks may sometimes be in competition with food production (see Popp et al., 2014), leading to possible “carbon leakage” by displacing food production via international trade (Searchinger et al., 2008). This has led to increasing scrutiny of bioenergy and bio-based products, invoking questions including:

  • Are bio-based products more sustainable than conventional products they replace?
  • How much land do they require?
  • Do they reduce or increase greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that cause climate change?
  • Do they contribute to air and water pollution via leaky nutrient cycles?
  • How effective are they at sparing finite resources?

Life cycle assessment

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a rigorous, scientific approach that can be applied to answer such questions based on methodology defined by the International Standards Organisation (ISO 14040; ISO 14044) and, for related carbon foot-printing, by PAS 2050. LCA quantifies the environmental impact (potential) over the life cycle of a product or service. An example is the carbon footprint, expressed as kg CO2e (climate impact potential) of generating one kWh of bio-electricity. LCA may be applied to:

  1. Benchmark the environmental intensity of bioenergy and bio-products against replaced conventional energy and products
  2. Identify production strategies that minimise environmental impacts and thus improve the sustainability of such products

 Farm stage “hotspots”

Cultivation of bio-feedstocks on farms is usually the hotspot stage in bioenergy and bio-based product value chains, giving rise to the largest share of environmental impact. Agriculture, forestry and land use change account for approximately 25% of global GHG emissions (IPCC, 2014), and approximately half of humans’ wider ecological footprint. This reflects the loss of large amounts of carbon from vegetation and soils when land is converted to agriculture, leaky cycling of nutrients (see the excellent video on nitrogen impacts made by the European Nitrogen Assessment), and the extraction and manufacture of inputs such as fertilisers. Figure 1, below, shows that wood heat has less impact on global warming, fossil resource depletion and acidification than oil heat, but may have a greater impact on eutrophication (nutrient enrichment of waters) than oil heat. The latter impact is highly dependent on farm management and landscape context of willow cultivation; application of fertiliser leads to relatively high eutrophication burdens, whilst planting willow on buffer strips next to rivers can “mop up” nutrients lost from neighbouring food production.   

d-styles-env-burdens

Figure 1. Environmental burdens of heat from wood chips produced using willow  cultivated in different ways, and from oil. Source: Styles et al. (2016)

Consequential LCA

Consequential LCA is an increasingly popular form of LCA that expands system boundaries to consider marginal direct and indirect changes incurred by a particular intervention, such as the introduction of bio-feedstock production into a farm system. In a recent study (Styles et al., 2015a) we applied consequential LCA to demonstrate that the introduction of a biogas plant into a large dairy farm to generate electricity from slurry, grass and maize can lead to substantial carbon savings by avoiding emissions from slurry storage and grid electricity generation, but also entails significant risk of large carbon leakage from indirect land use change caused by displacement of cattle feed production to other countries (e.g. soybeans from Brazil). Subsequently, we also found that GHG emissions from indirect land use change potentially caused by establishment of maize monocultures on arable farms to supply large crop-fed biogas plants can outweigh GHG savings from avoiding grid electricity generation. However, if maize is established on small portions of multiple farms as a break crop, optimisation of food crop rotations can mitigate this possible land use change effect (Styles et al., 2015b). Most of the bioenergy carbon calculators available online (e.g. Biograce) do not consider indirect effects, although the excellent Biomass Emissions And Counterfactual model produced by DECC does consider the counterfactual fate of feedstock that is used for bioenergy, such as US forest residues used to substitute coal in the Drax power station.

Would you like to learn about LCA methodology?

A part-time MSc module on Carbon Foot-printing and Life Cycle Assessment will be delivered entirely online by Bangor University from January through to April 2017, drawing on freely available online calculators and the latest research to demonstrate application of LCA to evaluate bioenergy and bio-based product value chains, and their interaction with food production. This module is part of the Industrial Biotechnology MSc, and BBSRC Advanced Training Partnership. Anyone wishing to enrol on the full Bangor or Aberystwyth MSc courses that this module sits within may also be eligible for the new English postgraduate loan. Registration now open, until 6th January!

 

See also the module on On-Farm Anaerobic Digestion (AD) – May 2017

Careers Fair for Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy Scientists

Our careers fair will provide you with the chance to meet employers face-to-face, to learn about current vacancies and opportunities available, and to market yourself to prospective employers. There are several talks you can attend about the sector and the opportunities within it, along with opportunity to get advice on your CV from professionals.  

  • Explore careers in IBBE from laboratory based jobs to working as a patent lawyer
  • Meet  employers with graduate schemes, current and future job opportunities
  • Hear from different employers about what it’s like to work for them
  • Get feedback on your CV in our one-to-one clinics
  • Speak with industrialists in our one-to-one clinics
  • Speak with academics  in our one-to-one clinics
  • Speak to the BBSRC about your future career in academia in our one-to-one clinics

SPACES ARE LIMITED SO BOOK NOW TO AVOID DISAPPOINTMENT HERE.